After reading the article, I wonder if there is not an inherent bias in the approach.
What they measured was the deflection of light from galactic sources that were 6 billion light years away. Using a method not described in the article, they were able to measure the amount of gravitational deflection between the light sources and our current observation position. I believe this is a composite measure of gravitational lensing.
I assume that their measurements are accurate. To my understanding, there is also an assumption that a specific portion of the lensing is due to dark matter. This has an appearance of circular logic. One of their assumptions about measuring the effect of dark matter is that they know how much effect dark matter has.
Have I gotten something wrong here? It's always a guessing game using an article intended for the general public when trying to understand scientific findings. Is there anyone out there with meaningful credentials who can clear this up? (I promise that I will ignore all the self appointed "experts" who don't actually have any more knowledge then I do.)
There are a large number of anti-intellectual posters on Slashdot. All the comments claiming that college/university are useless basically fall into this category.
University and colleges are not trade schools and they shouldn't be. For an accredited institution (as opposed to tech schools) the goal is education, not solely getting employment. Certificate program are even further removed from education. Online "badges" have even lower value.
At an accredited undergraduate school, you have to take general education requirements. You have to prove that you can learn and function outside you area of expertise. You have to be able to read various kinds of materials and understand them well enough to speak and write about the subject matter.
Attending classes gives the experience of working in a structured environment with over-site, well articulated goals and conclusive feedback i.e. grades. The students have to perform both as individuals and in a group. This is supposed to be an extension of the high school experience, but these days that is not a given. Succeeding in this environment is a reasonable preparation for the professional work environment.
Four year education is also specifically intended to weed out the unfit. It is expected that individuals will drop out, or change their majors to something they can accomplish. The school provides "quality control", and makes sure that grades are earned, rather then the result of cheating. (This is becoming a huge problem, even at the highest end institutions.) A school lives or dies in the long run depending on the qualities of the graduates. There is positive institutional pressure to maintains standards.
For profit trade schools operate on a different set of rules. Like any business, their goal is to make money. The primary source of money is student tuition. There is a strong incentive to not flunk people. Giving bad grades hurts the economic model. Any staff member who makes too many students drop out will eventually be asked to leave. Teachers are rewarded for keeping everyone in the system until they end the course of study, no matter how they perform.
So when someone makes a hiring decision, they know that the person with the four year degree has a lot more credibility then then someone from a non-accredited institution. Now it might be the case that they are just looking for the cheapest possible body, so they will go for the person who went to the non-accredited school, but that is not the fault of the school. It just means that they are a part of the current corporate culture of greed, thieving and incompetence. They screw the employees, customers and stockholders to put all the profit in the pockets of upper management. To the extent that is an education problem, rack it up to the MBA programs.
Also, getting a four year degree is not the end of learning, it is the beginning. Anyone who gets out and understands education has the tools to keep learning for the rest of their life. Anyone who expects to be a professional will always be a student, one way or another.
So how does a "badge" compare? Well, there is no assurance that cheating did not occur. There is no effective over-site of any kind. The person at the terminal could be a dog, for all anyone knows. There is no interpersonal interaction, it's all automated. There is no equivalent of general education. Objectively, a badge has no intrinsic value. Now someone might have other formal training which would show their competence, and then a badge could be considered in that context. Without other evidence a badge is just hot air.
Accredited education offers something that other kinds of institutions do not. If you don't understand this then you are ignorant. If you say things that degrade accredited education then you are an anti-intellectual. QED
In Iran, they build a halal closed internet. Here in the US they let the entrenched media conglomerates control the flow of information by abusing civil law to maintain a de facto cartel.
Iran has a state enforced religious code, in the US they privatize the enforcement to self serving corrupt economic interests that want to maintain the status quo by eliminating competition. Without meaningful competition there is no functioning capitalism.
The difference in only in the execution, not the result. The US version is more sophisticated, and the Iranian version is more crude. That's about it.
How difficult is it to exploit this resource vs exploiting moon resources? I would think that the energy requirements would be smaller for a rock in orbit then going into the moon's gravity well and returning to earth. Of course any mining would require moving the body into a stable orbit.
I've read science fiction where solar reflectors are used to smelt nickel iron rocks in vacuum. Are there any technical studies about the feasibility of this? With automated processing, would it be economically feasible to just extract rare earths/precious metals and return them?
I've been rather cynical about private enterprise in space. Right now the only money making sectors are telecommunications and non-government imaging (SPOT, weather satellites). Everything else is government funded one way or another. Space tourism is just starting up, but still has to prove itself.
The only other near term economic reason to go is resources. As far as I know there have been no experiments with collecting solar energy and sending it to earth. Clearly energy extraction will take a large amount of fundamental R&D before we even know if it can work. These rocks could be an achievable goal for economically sustainable space exploration.
No single breakthrough will make solar power economically competitive, and it will not happen because "a facility in the PRC" is making solar cells in large unit volumes. The only people who talk that way are clueless PR writers and you.
Large scale solar power of any type is going to be the result of a lot of innovation over an extended period of time, and it is going to have a long and expensive road to large scale deployment. That's true for large civic engineering projects in general.
Your comment shows that you are to stupid to understand this. So since you think that this kind of post is meaningless and a waste of time, why don't you skip reading it and posting about it? You could spend your time marveling about how smart you are, and spare the rest of us having to read or reply to your drivel. You are wrong and we don't really care what you think, so STFU.
In case it's not perfectly clear at this point, this is a personal attack. You're welcome.
Should IBM be registered as the US agent of a foreign government? In the last year or so they stopped reporting how many people they employ on a per country basis. I can only assume that they did this so they could maintain an illusion that they were still a US-centric organization.
Given the way many large US based multinational companies behave, they routinely put their corporate interests at odds with the US government and economy. They ship as many jobs as they can overseas and doge taxes. GE paid no federal income tax last year. GM invested in it's China operations while it was in a bankruptcy funded by the US Treasury.
But since they are still "US" corporations they don't get the kind of scrutiny that would be required if they were not US based. It would be a lot more realistic to recognize that they have no meaningful commitment to the US and they act on their narrowly perceived economic goals. It would be better for the country if their access to the US political establishment was limited, based on how their economic interests driven by non-US governments.
Although amusing, this is a perfectly example of what results from Libertarian logic. If property rights override all other rights, then large property owners are effectively tyrants.
How many times have there been Slashdot postings about corporate based discussion boards that censor negative comments?
Rand Paul came out a couple of years ago and said that racial prejudice should be legal in business, because property rights were absolute. (This time I'm not going to look it up, you go an find it on Google.)
Personally, one of my dreams is to discriminate against a Libertarian in an economic transaction simply because of their political affiliation. In theory, they should be supportive of my position, since property rights are absolute. In practice, I think they would squeal like a stuck pig. I have a strong hunch that no Libertarian can conceive that they would be excluded from anything because of personal prejudice.
Clearly, this has an impact on the strategic capabilities of the Talaban.
There are two possibilities. Either they are eliminating all cell phones, or only the cell phones of the non-Talaban under their control. If the get rid of all cell phones, then their ability to coordinate and send/receive timely information will be seriously impacted. They will become less effective.
If they keep cell phones for themselves, they become much more obvious targets. It will be easier to listen in on their communications because they will be the only ones talking. Even just detecting a cell phone signal will flag the location of a Talaban member. Not such a good move in the era of loitering UAVs with GPS enabled munitions.
It's nice when your enemies are such stupid fanatics that they either shoot themselves in the foot, or paint a target on their backs. I hope they find even more ways to use their religious fanaticism screw themselves up.
You realize that no one is really suggesting anything like this at all, and you are just throwing a hissy fit. So you are not only arrogant, stupid and self absorbed, you are pathetically childish. It's really to bad that the rest of the adults in the room (see the other responders) have to waste their time explaining to you how wrong you are, and why you are such an idiot.
The next time you want to have a tantrum because you are afraid that someone will take away you favorite toy, do the rest of us a big favor and go in the corner and hold your breath until you turn blue and die. That will make us all really sorry, and then we would know that you are right.
Now go to your room and take a nap, because you are too cranky to play with the other kids.
You are defending social parasites. When people or corporations use publicly funded resources and don't pay a fair share, they are freeloaders. It is a form of stealing. It is no different then putting enough money in a newspaper vending machine to open it and then taking multiple copies, or going into a field and stealing produce. Your are getting something for nothing and the burden falls on those who do pay what they owe.
You will be better off if you learn a range of programming paradigms. Knowing how to solve programming issues in a variety of ways will help your problem solving in whatever language you are using, even if it does not support the most appropriate paradigm for the job.
Having said that, the best way to learn different paradigms is to use languages that are different from each other. Learning only languages that share paradigms will not stretch your abilities that much. For example, in the big picture, C++ and Java are not that far apart.
My personal experience is that Lisp/Scheme is different enough from any of the C derived languages that it forces you to learn to think a new way. Learning Scheme will make you a better C++ coder. I still haven't spent the time to learn Haskell, but I plan to do so. I think it will improve my abilities no matter what I am working on. Lazy, strict functional programming is far enough removed from what I normally do that I expect to learn a lot of new ways to think about coding.
I don't have specific references, but t think that a lot of the funds are being invested outside the USA because there is a greater rate of return. For example, the formerly bankrupt General Motors is doing very well in China right now. So effectively the US taxpayer bailed out GM which then invested in China. So now we are "outsourcing" our complete economic system.
You raise a very interesting point. I have observed that the Russia (the former Soviet Union) and the USA have followed a similar course since the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Both systems have been taken over by corrupt and inefficient economic elites. The difference is that in Russia they admit what has happened, and explicitly refer to the "plutocrats" when talking about their economic situation. In the USA no one has admitted that our economy is run by a clique of incompetent self serving thieves that are enriching themselves at the expense of the US and world economy. Only with the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement has there been any public discourse about how intrinsically corrupt our economy has become.
Here is an interesting post on Reddit from someone inside the hedge fund industry about how the game is really rigged. It's an insiders view of how a segment of the corrupt economic system runs.
Furthermore, you have absolutely no chance in terms of access to the best services. Hedge funds have a direct line to investment bank's institutional brokerage teams - these are the guys that spend day and night sucking up to hedge funds, trying to get them the best deals at the cheapest rates. This means that while you're buying stocks and bonds, hedge funds are getting special rights, warrants, sweetheart deals, private placement deals, options, bigger discounts on bonds, and much better bulk commission rates and lower spreads on stocks. If you're paying 4.25$ for a 4.15$ stock, they are paying something like 4.16$. And they are eating alive your profits because when the stock goes up to $4.30, they can activate another warrant to purchase 20m shares at $4.25, diluting the value of your shares.
Next, you lack information and exposure. You have no idea what is going on in the market besides what you see on the news - while hedge funds have analysts working around the clock and a bunch of service providers who give minute-by-minute analysis of their portfolio opportunities and weaknesses in all markets with exposures to nearly everything. Meaning, if there is an opportunity in the real estate market (i.e. legislation), it might take you weeks to get in - hedge funds will have gotten in the minute the legislation was passed. Furthermore, when IPOs come out for companies, hedge funds get top billing on the primary market shares - which means investment banks are selling directly to them. Once the secondary market becomes available, hedge funds are up 15-20% on these investments, sometimes within hours.
Finally, you have no capital compared to these hedge funds. The people who invest in these hedge funds are not just the 1%, they are the 0.1%. These are the guys with 500million dollar bank accounts and the ability to do whatever the fuck they want. Hedge funds know this, and they invest without having to care about whether their clients can pay the rent or send their kids to college. All of that is irrelevant. Their sole purpose is to earn money, not to mitigate risk.
Let's list some real world examples of "efficient" corporate behavior.
Enron
Lehman Bros.
BP Gulf Oil Spill
Exxon Valdez
Fukushima
Bhopal (Union Carbide)
AIG
WorldCom
Washington Mutual
General Motors
CIT Group
Not to mention all the "too big to fail" financial companies that got bailed out on the backs of the taxpayers. It was just revealed this week that the amount of assets back up by the US Treasury was about 77 Trillion $US.
CME Group, parent of the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange, has threatened to leave the state in protest of a temporary increase to the state's corporate income tax rate. The proposal would tax income from just 27.54 percent of electronic transactions on local exchanges, costing the state an estimated $100 million a year.
Sears, for its part, would see a renewal of a special taxing district in Hoffman Estates. This would allow Sears to continue to get a break on local property taxes, although at a lower level. Under the deal, the retailer also would also receive a state incentive package to retain jobs here. That would to include tax credits worth $15 million a year for 10 years, another $150 million in potential tax breaks.
So we know that the Hungarian guy was trying to use what he perceived as his individual power to force Marriott to give him a job. Now we see two large Illinois companies use their real power to skip out on their corporate responsibility to support the state. They consume a lot of state resources, and they use their political influence to be parasites and free loaders. Since they got away with it this time, what's to stop them from deciding that they are going to pay no taxes in the coming years, like GE did last year?
All I see is the rich and powerful get away with de-facto extortion, and the individual getting nailed for trying to extort. One set of laws for the rich, another set for the poor.
I find all the "C sucks" comments to be both amusing and stupid. Without C code there would literally be no Internet. Every bit you are sending and receiving uses C. The two operating systems that represent 99.99% or more of the running computers that are online run C. Both Windows and Linux use the BSD TCP/IP stack.
If C did not get the job done for this kind of computing then it would have been replaced. The fact that C thrives in the systems programming domain is a tribute to it's utility.
A proficient C coder can write clear, maintainable, efficient code that runs on many platforms. This requires both skill and practice. Not everyone is capable of doing this. It requires the ability to keep multiple competing abstractions in mind when coding. I think a lot of people try this and find it difficult and then blame the language. Those who persevere and learn this style of working can usually move on to other kinds of programming and also do excellent work.
Some problem domains require different languages and different skill sets. Personally, I like writing code where I know that if I were to look at the assembly code generated by the compiler I can see how it relates to the C code I wrote. I rarely do this, but it's good to know that I can if I want to. I'm doing any C coding now, because I always use the appropriate language to the task. But I also know that my C coding skills give me a distinct advantage in solving difficult problems, no matter what they are,
I have a friend who used to work in quality control for the defense industry, and he told me that this kind of thing has been going on a long time. Sometimes you could tell just by looking at the packaging that the parts were not what they were supposed to be. Still, it was very hard to get vendors taken off the approved list. I'm not going to name names, but some of these were large firms that you may have heard of.
Perhaps it has become even worse in the last few years since he was involved. Or perhaps they are paying more attention since so much stuff now comes from Asia?
The system is still under construction and is scheduled to enter full service in November 2012 with 864 cabinets. As of the November 2011 TOP500 list, it uses 68,544 2.0GHz 8-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors packed in 672 cabinets, for a total of 548,352 cores, manufactured by Fujitsu with 45 nm CMOS process technology. Each cabinet contains 96 compute nodes in addition to 6 IO nodes. Each compute node contains a single processor and 16 GB of memory. Its water cooling system minimizes failure rate and power consumption.
The K uses a proprietary six-dimensional torus network interconnect called Tofu, and a Tofu-optimized Message Passing Interface based on the open-source Open MPI library. Users can create application programs adapted to either a one-, two-, or three-dimensional torus network.
IBM has the Sequoia system coming on line in 2012 and it is also targeted at the 20 Petaflop range. It will be significantly more power efficient at 3000 Mflops/watt, three times lower then the K system
The level of comment on the article is puerile (look it up, most of you don't know what it means).
First the shear amount of dumb laser jokes is astounding. It seems very few people bothered to read any of the other posts or bothered to consider that maybe someone else on Shashdot had ever seen Austin Powers. Or Star Trek. Or your favorite SF series here. Real herd behavior in action.
Next, the number of people whining about 200 PETAWATTS!!!!!! was really sad. Are the posters hear actually that ignorant about the concept of instantaneous power values and pulsed power systems? I am surprised by this level of technical ignorance.
Also, does anyone seriously think that a project of this size would be approved without an air tight argument that the experiment will operate in a domain where there are likely to be measurable results? Is it even vaguely possible that physicists picked "200 petawatts of power at a target for less than a trillionth of a second " by guessing? They have a well reasoned case to do the experiment, and part of this is a way to measure the results. But many of the post deride the practicality of the experiment, and even make specific statements that it won't work and that key measurement components are nonexistent. All based around a badly written publicity piece and their extensive personal knowledge of ultra high powered lasers and the mathematics of virtual particle production in the ground state of the space-time vacuum.
The worst and most puzzling part is the shear amount of hostility shown towards science. Assuming that it pork spending, saying it useless, that it can't show anything interesting, that the resources would be better spent somewhere else. All without a shred of logic or reference to any external source. This is the kind of anti-intellectual crap I expect from Fox News, not Slashdot readers. All I see here is a few true nerds surrounded by a bunch of fakes who either express their ignorance directly or try and hide it by making a ridiculous hostile comments.
Slashdot Mirror
What they measured was the deflection of light from galactic sources that were 6 billion light years away. Using a method not described in the article, they were able to measure the amount of gravitational deflection between the light sources and our current observation position. I believe this is a composite measure of gravitational lensing.
I assume that their measurements are accurate. To my understanding, there is also an assumption that a specific portion of the lensing is due to dark matter. This has an appearance of circular logic. One of their assumptions about measuring the effect of dark matter is that they know how much effect dark matter has.
Have I gotten something wrong here? It's always a guessing game using an article intended for the general public when trying to understand scientific findings. Is there anyone out there with meaningful credentials who can clear this up? (I promise that I will ignore all the self appointed "experts" who don't actually have any more knowledge then I do.)
University and colleges are not trade schools and they shouldn't be. For an accredited institution (as opposed to tech schools) the goal is education, not solely getting employment. Certificate program are even further removed from education. Online "badges" have even lower value.
At an accredited undergraduate school, you have to take general education requirements. You have to prove that you can learn and function outside you area of expertise. You have to be able to read various kinds of materials and understand them well enough to speak and write about the subject matter.
Attending classes gives the experience of working in a structured environment with over-site, well articulated goals and conclusive feedback i.e. grades. The students have to perform both as individuals and in a group. This is supposed to be an extension of the high school experience, but these days that is not a given. Succeeding in this environment is a reasonable preparation for the professional work environment.
Four year education is also specifically intended to weed out the unfit. It is expected that individuals will drop out, or change their majors to something they can accomplish. The school provides "quality control", and makes sure that grades are earned, rather then the result of cheating. (This is becoming a huge problem, even at the highest end institutions.) A school lives or dies in the long run depending on the qualities of the graduates. There is positive institutional pressure to maintains standards.
For profit trade schools operate on a different set of rules. Like any business, their goal is to make money. The primary source of money is student tuition. There is a strong incentive to not flunk people. Giving bad grades hurts the economic model. Any staff member who makes too many students drop out will eventually be asked to leave. Teachers are rewarded for keeping everyone in the system until they end the course of study, no matter how they perform.
So when someone makes a hiring decision, they know that the person with the four year degree has a lot more credibility then then someone from a non-accredited institution. Now it might be the case that they are just looking for the cheapest possible body, so they will go for the person who went to the non-accredited school, but that is not the fault of the school. It just means that they are a part of the current corporate culture of greed, thieving and incompetence. They screw the employees, customers and stockholders to put all the profit in the pockets of upper management. To the extent that is an education problem, rack it up to the MBA programs.
Also, getting a four year degree is not the end of learning, it is the beginning. Anyone who gets out and understands education has the tools to keep learning for the rest of their life. Anyone who expects to be a professional will always be a student, one way or another.
So how does a "badge" compare? Well, there is no assurance that cheating did not occur. There is no effective over-site of any kind. The person at the terminal could be a dog, for all anyone knows. There is no interpersonal interaction, it's all automated. There is no equivalent of general education. Objectively, a badge has no intrinsic value. Now someone might have other formal training which would show their competence, and then a badge could be considered in that context. Without other evidence a badge is just hot air.
Accredited education offers something that other kinds of institutions do not. If you don't understand this then you are ignorant. If you say things that degrade accredited education then you are an anti-intellectual. QED
In Iran, they build a halal closed internet. Here in the US they let the entrenched media conglomerates control the flow of information by abusing civil law to maintain a de facto cartel.
Iran has a state enforced religious code, in the US they privatize the enforcement to self serving corrupt economic interests that want to maintain the status quo by eliminating competition. Without meaningful competition there is no functioning capitalism.
The difference in only in the execution, not the result. The US version is more sophisticated, and the Iranian version is more crude. That's about it.
I've read science fiction where solar reflectors are used to smelt nickel iron rocks in vacuum. Are there any technical studies about the feasibility of this? With automated processing, would it be economically feasible to just extract rare earths/precious metals and return them?
I've been rather cynical about private enterprise in space. Right now the only money making sectors are telecommunications and non-government imaging (SPOT, weather satellites). Everything else is government funded one way or another. Space tourism is just starting up, but still has to prove itself.
The only other near term economic reason to go is resources. As far as I know there have been no experiments with collecting solar energy and sending it to earth. Clearly energy extraction will take a large amount of fundamental R&D before we even know if it can work. These rocks could be an achievable goal for economically sustainable space exploration.
Large scale solar power of any type is going to be the result of a lot of innovation over an extended period of time, and it is going to have a long and expensive road to large scale deployment. That's true for large civic engineering projects in general.
Your comment shows that you are to stupid to understand this. So since you think that this kind of post is meaningless and a waste of time, why don't you skip reading it and posting about it? You could spend your time marveling about how smart you are, and spare the rest of us having to read or reply to your drivel. You are wrong and we don't really care what you think, so STFU.
In case it's not perfectly clear at this point, this is a personal attack. You're welcome.
Given the way many large US based multinational companies behave, they routinely put their corporate interests at odds with the US government and economy. They ship as many jobs as they can overseas and doge taxes. GE paid no federal income tax last year. GM invested in it's China operations while it was in a bankruptcy funded by the US Treasury.
But since they are still "US" corporations they don't get the kind of scrutiny that would be required if they were not US based. It would be a lot more realistic to recognize that they have no meaningful commitment to the US and they act on their narrowly perceived economic goals. It would be better for the country if their access to the US political establishment was limited, based on how their economic interests driven by non-US governments.
How many times have there been Slashdot postings about corporate based discussion boards that censor negative comments?
Rand Paul came out a couple of years ago and said that racial prejudice should be legal in business, because property rights were absolute. (This time I'm not going to look it up, you go an find it on Google.)
Personally, one of my dreams is to discriminate against a Libertarian in an economic transaction simply because of their political affiliation. In theory, they should be supportive of my position, since property rights are absolute. In practice, I think they would squeal like a stuck pig. I have a strong hunch that no Libertarian can conceive that they would be excluded from anything because of personal prejudice.
There are two possibilities. Either they are eliminating all cell phones, or only the cell phones of the non-Talaban under their control. If the get rid of all cell phones, then their ability to coordinate and send/receive timely information will be seriously impacted. They will become less effective.
If they keep cell phones for themselves, they become much more obvious targets. It will be easier to listen in on their communications because they will be the only ones talking. Even just detecting a cell phone signal will flag the location of a Talaban member. Not such a good move in the era of loitering UAVs with GPS enabled munitions.
It's nice when your enemies are such stupid fanatics that they either shoot themselves in the foot, or paint a target on their backs. I hope they find even more ways to use their religious fanaticism screw themselves up.
The next time you want to have a tantrum because you are afraid that someone will take away you favorite toy, do the rest of us a big favor and go in the corner and hold your breath until you turn blue and die. That will make us all really sorry, and then we would know that you are right.
Now go to your room and take a nap, because you are too cranky to play with the other kids.
You are defending social parasites. When people or corporations use publicly funded resources and don't pay a fair share, they are freeloaders. It is a form of stealing. It is no different then putting enough money in a newspaper vending machine to open it and then taking multiple copies, or going into a field and stealing produce. Your are getting something for nothing and the burden falls on those who do pay what they owe.
Having said that, the best way to learn different paradigms is to use languages that are different from each other. Learning only languages that share paradigms will not stretch your abilities that much. For example, in the big picture, C++ and Java are not that far apart.
My personal experience is that Lisp/Scheme is different enough from any of the C derived languages that it forces you to learn to think a new way. Learning Scheme will make you a better C++ coder. I still haven't spent the time to learn Haskell, but I plan to do so. I think it will improve my abilities no matter what I am working on. Lazy, strict functional programming is far enough removed from what I normally do that I expect to learn a lot of new ways to think about coding.
I don't have specific references, but t think that a lot of the funds are being invested outside the USA because there is a greater rate of return. For example, the formerly bankrupt General Motors is doing very well in China right now. So effectively the US taxpayer bailed out GM which then invested in China. So now we are "outsourcing" our complete economic system.
Here is an interesting post on Reddit from someone inside the hedge fund industry about how the game is really rigged. It's an insiders view of how a segment of the corrupt economic system runs.
http://www.reddit.com/r/occupywallstreet/comments/muqzv/wall_of_text_i_work_in_wall_street_and_work_in
Just wondering.
Enron
Lehman Bros.
BP Gulf Oil Spill
Exxon Valdez
Fukushima
Bhopal (Union Carbide)
AIG
WorldCom
Washington Mutual
General Motors
CIT Group
Not to mention all the "too big to fail" financial companies that got bailed out on the backs of the taxpayers. It was just revealed this week that the amount of assets back up by the US Treasury was about 77 Trillion $US.
Efficient Business
PS. You're a fucking racist slug.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-11-25/business/chi-state-lawmakers-poised-to-act-on-tax-breaks-for-sears-cme-20111125_1_income-tax-tax-credit-cme-group
So we know that the Hungarian guy was trying to use what he perceived as his individual power to force Marriott to give him a job. Now we see two large Illinois companies use their real power to skip out on their corporate responsibility to support the state. They consume a lot of state resources, and they use their political influence to be parasites and free loaders. Since they got away with it this time, what's to stop them from deciding that they are going to pay no taxes in the coming years, like GE did last year?
All I see is the rich and powerful get away with de-facto extortion, and the individual getting nailed for trying to extort. One set of laws for the rich, another set for the poor.
Not Lucite, Carbonite.
This device raises an interesting question: can the Raspberry Pi be used as an Android host? It seems inevitable that someone will try that out.
Tell them you type for a living.
Now that I have gotten away from that world, I don't want to be cool. It gets in the way too much.
If C did not get the job done for this kind of computing then it would have been replaced. The fact that C thrives in the systems programming domain is a tribute to it's utility.
A proficient C coder can write clear, maintainable, efficient code that runs on many platforms. This requires both skill and practice. Not everyone is capable of doing this. It requires the ability to keep multiple competing abstractions in mind when coding. I think a lot of people try this and find it difficult and then blame the language. Those who persevere and learn this style of working can usually move on to other kinds of programming and also do excellent work.
Some problem domains require different languages and different skill sets. Personally, I like writing code where I know that if I were to look at the assembly code generated by the compiler I can see how it relates to the C code I wrote. I rarely do this, but it's good to know that I can if I want to. I'm doing any C coding now, because I always use the appropriate language to the task. But I also know that my C coding skills give me a distinct advantage in solving difficult problems, no matter what they are,
Perhaps it has become even worse in the last few years since he was involved. Or perhaps they are paying more attention since so much stuff now comes from Asia?
(KGB) in Cyrillic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer
IBM has the Sequoia system coming on line in 2012 and it is also targeted at the 20 Petaflop range. It will be significantly more power efficient at 3000 Mflops/watt, three times lower then the K system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Sequoia
First the shear amount of dumb laser jokes is astounding. It seems very few people bothered to read any of the other posts or bothered to consider that maybe someone else on Shashdot had ever seen Austin Powers. Or Star Trek. Or your favorite SF series here. Real herd behavior in action.
Next, the number of people whining about 200 PETAWATTS!!!!!! was really sad. Are the posters hear actually that ignorant about the concept of instantaneous power values and pulsed power systems? I am surprised by this level of technical ignorance.
Also, does anyone seriously think that a project of this size would be approved without an air tight argument that the experiment will operate in a domain where there are likely to be measurable results? Is it even vaguely possible that physicists picked "200 petawatts of power at a target for less than a trillionth of a second " by guessing? They have a well reasoned case to do the experiment, and part of this is a way to measure the results. But many of the post deride the practicality of the experiment, and even make specific statements that it won't work and that key measurement components are nonexistent. All based around a badly written publicity piece and their extensive personal knowledge of ultra high powered lasers and the mathematics of virtual particle production in the ground state of the space-time vacuum.
The worst and most puzzling part is the shear amount of hostility shown towards science. Assuming that it pork spending, saying it useless, that it can't show anything interesting, that the resources would be better spent somewhere else. All without a shred of logic or reference to any external source. This is the kind of anti-intellectual crap I expect from Fox News, not Slashdot readers. All I see here is a few true nerds surrounded by a bunch of fakes who either express their ignorance directly or try and hide it by making a ridiculous hostile comments.